The Atom 230 at 1.6 GHz is approximately 13% slower in our benchmark set than the Athlon 64 2000+ clocked at 1 GHz. The Intel Atom can claim to be faster only in the data compression program WinRAR and when scanning for viruses.

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The Celeron 220, which is based on the previous board model from Intel’s Atom system, is 29% faster than the Athlon 64.

Are the Core 2 Solos faster than the Atoms despite the lower clock speed?

Yes. In my experience, a Core2 Solo is roughly twice as fast as an Atom at the same clockspeed.

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Is the Z5xx series just slower than the N270?

In theory the Z530 should be the same speed as the N270. In practice I believe it's a little slower. This might be due to the chipset, which is different between the Z and the N-series.

The Z-series is a bit more power efficient than the N-series, and was originally meant for embedded applications (computers in TVs, cars, navigators, etc) and for MIDs (mobile internet devices, which is somewhere between a netbook and an iPod touch). What happened was that almost nobody sold or bought MIDs, and the Z-series ended in a small number of netbooks to circumvent Intels idiotic restrictions on Atom-N netbooks (such as 1024x600 max resolution an 10-inch max display size).

That Core 2 Solo has a TDP of 5.5 watts - a bit more than the N270's 2.5 watts. However the N270 is often paired with the power-sucking Intel 945GSE + ICH7M combo. In practice this makes it very close to as power-consuming as a Core 2 Solo platform, at least while doing light tasks.

The SU3500 is substantially quicker than the Atom, but it's also vastly more expensive. And the manufacturers seem to think it's a good choice for machines that are relatively big and clunky (like the Acer Aspire Timeline series) compared to netbooks, which kind of defeats the point. If they put it in an 11- or 12-inch machine that weighs no more than 1.5 kg then I'd really perk up.

As things stand I think the Samsung NC20 is still the most attractive machine like this.

Actually, manufacturers are putting these Core 2 Solo processors in so-called "CULV" thin-and-light models like the MSI X-Slim X340 and Gigabyte M1305. These do tend to be about twice the cost of an Atom-based netbook though.

I meant "big and clunky" compared to netbooks (and said so ). The MSI X-Slim X340 weighs 1.3 kg (with the weak 4-cell battery), flexes like a bodybuilder, and is 330 mm wide. The Gigabyte M1305 is 325 mm wide and weighs 1.85 kg. The Acer Aspire Timeline that I mentioned is more attractive than those two, but weighs 1.6 kg and is 322 mm wide. None of these are as real-world portable (stiff, light, small footprint) as my five-year-old 12-inch PowerBook, much less a good netbook.

I realise Intel more-or-less hates what the Atom has become, but they'll have to do better than the SU3500 to halt the netbook craze. It costs more than a P8400, for example, but is nowhere near as quick. If you disable Adobe Flash and tread lightly, you'll get nearly the same battery life from a P8400-based machine (e.g. a 13-inch MacBook Pro), yet have high performance on tap should you need it. Obviously you still need to carry around the thermal engineering to dissipate 25 watts, but that's just about the only disadvantage of the P8400 over the SU3500.

An Atom-based netbook is half the price of a notebook with a CULV Core 2, which makes a performance comparison nearly pointless.

The 12-inch form factor is ideal. The width of the screen plus a narrow bezel is about the same as a full-size keyboard. The current popularity of ~13.3-inch screens and wide bezels is depressing for someone like myself who wants effortless portability.

The Samsung NC20 is appealing in this context. 12-inch screen, almost full-size keyboard, VIA chipset and Nano CPU that's both efficient and powerful enough (slightly faster on a mixed workload than an N270). £350 at Dixons or Amazon.

Originally posted by Mark Laarson:Holy shit mobile CPUs are expensive.

Always have been.

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If you disable Adobe Flash and tread lightly

Major compromise right there, and along with

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Obviously you still need to carry around the thermal engineering to dissipate 25 watts

are a major reason why ULV processors still sell. And a

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e.g. a 13-inch MacBook Pro

is upwards of 2 kg. (Yeah, Apple's 13" notebooks have always been heavy -- the pre-unibody MacBook was 2.5 kg, close to the weight of the 15.4" MacBook Pro.)

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The Samsung NC20 is appealing in this context. 12-inch screen, almost full-size keyboard, VIA chipset and Nano CPU that's both efficient and powerful enough (slightly faster on a mixed workload than an N270). £350 at Dixons or Amazon.

It does run hotter than an Atom, though, especially at the popular 1.3 GHz speed grade, so you are trading away some weight benefit and battery life in favor of it. (And its SIMD units suck, if I remember right, so it does poorly on anything involving multimedia, compared even to Atom.)

I like notebooks that idle at low power. In my use, the need for a long battery life often coincides with a low performance requirement. But it's nice to have the flexibility to trade battery life for performance should it be required.

The NC20 returns about an hour less battery life than the NC10 when both are under light load (and a good bit of that must be attributed to the larger screen). The VIA chipset and CPU consume very little power at idle. The difference increases a bit when both are cranked, because the Nano does run hotter (less efficiently, frankly) when pushed. I wonder if the 65 nm Fujitsu process versus 45 nm Intel is responsible for some of that.

My argument in favour of the P8400 (or similar) over the SU3500 is that the former scales back beautifully under low load, yet has loads more power on tap when needed. The P8400 is pretty efficient under load too. And you can "work faster to idle sooner". I realise there's a weight penalty for carrying around big heatpipes, etc.

Flash is the number one enemy of battery life. It sometimes consumes as many CPU cycles as its given, and thus favours CPUs with a low TDP like the SU3500.

On a bit of a tangent, low idle power was one of the strong points of the PowerPC G4 chips. I measured the power consumption of my 1.2 GHz iBook G4 many years ago (long before LED backlights and SSDs hit the scene). At idle, with the disk spinning and the 12-inch screen dim but usable indoors, that machine used just 8 watts! Granted, that rose to around 25 watts at full load with the screen at max brightness. But it's impressive how efficient that machine was while surfing the web of the era. N270-based netbooks use nearly 8 watts at idle with a small LED screen and not really any more peak speed, and this is five years later. The problem is the chipset.

Originally posted by Prototyped:Atom makes Intel hardly any money at all, so Intel wants to increase average selling prices by focusing on these higher-margin products.

Atom makes intel heaving piled gobs of pulsating money. They're incredibly small. Thusly they cost very little to make, and even though they are also cheap to buy, the margin is very very high. On top of that the netbook/nettop market is very large right now, while the rest of the market is shrinking.

Not when you take into account the R&D costs to design Atom in the first place, which need to be recouped via revenue Intel makes on Atom. At $25 a set for the N270 + 945GSE + ICH7M, I can't see Atom making Intel much money at all.

But my major point was that lower-profit Atom sales cut into more profitable sales of Intel's mainstream processors, which is something Intel would like to reverse. If Intel makes gobs of money on Atom, and they might given the volume of its sales, they make much more per unit sold on the mainstream processors.